4 Steps: Update Your Resume

step 3

Insert evidence into your resume

At this stage, your resume should be heavy on applicable, practical work experience and thin in most other areas. In order to ensure that you make this point clear, enhance that experience with the kind of evidence anyone can understand: hard numbers. In other words, shape your work experience so that it fiscally reflects your achievements. It doesn’t matter whether those achievements relate to cutting costs and saving money or to boosting sales and making money — the overriding key is communicating your productive value.

This will be much harder for some than it will be for others, since it’s not common for all of us to know exactly how we contributed to the company’s bottom line. In that case, work in the opposite direction. For example, identify how, where and to what extent your department expanded during the time you worked in it. Then shrink down the scope of these figures until they reach reasonable levels for someone in your position. Just be careful how you phrase this; don’t claim credit you don’t deserve — instead, let the reader infer that credit by association.

step 4

Proofread your resume

It might be easy to scoff at this last step, but be warned; there will be those who take it seriously, meaning that you just allowed your competition to get a leg up on you. Because of the increased competition, few can afford even the smallest disadvantages, and neglecting to fully proofread is one you can avoid. In any job market, there is little tolerance for spelling errors, but in this market there is even less.

You can begin with a spell-check, but you probably know very well by now that most standard spell-checks are full of holes. Let it catch the major gaffes in the first run-through. Then subject that version to at least one other set of eyes, ones you trust.

Finally, since your resume is in a new format, the last bit of proofreading should be to e-mail it to yourself, or the same close friend who was your second set of eyes, and reopen it to ensure the integrity of your new format.